Hours after signing an agreement yesterday on cooperation with India on civilian nuclear technology, President George W. Bush issued a "signing statement" insisting that the executive branch was not bound by terms of the agreement approved by the House of Representatives and Senate, RAW STORY has learned.

Bush is not the first president to push the line on prerogative power, but he has taken it the furthest and done so while he and his supporters call themselves "conservatives." What's interesting is that I think that they genuinely are conservatives, not in the traditional American sense whereby one refers to Hamilton (or, conversely, to Madison - a contradiction we'll tease out over time). This is something different, and, in a perverse way, new.

The American founders had read their Montesquieu. Madison quotes him approvingly in Federalist #47: "There can be no liberty where the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person." This is Madison defending the Constitution against critics who claimed it did not feature enough separation of powers.

No political truth is certainly of greater intrinsic value, or is stamped with the authority of more enlightened patrons of liberty, than that on which the objection is founded. The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, selfappointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny. Were the federal Constitution, therefore, really chargeable with the accumulation of power, or with a mixture of powers, having a dangerous tendency to such an accumulation, no further arguments would be necessary to inspire a universal reprobation of the system.

Let no one say that the Bush crowd are "not conservatives." They are, in fact, ur-conservatives, conservatives of a sort alien to the American political tradition.